• Military

• WMD Menu                           

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

09 October 2002

Invasion Key to Keeping Nukes from Hussein, U.S. Expert Says

(Kenneth Pollack believes alternatives would not accomplish that goal)
(5610)
Washington - The author of a new book on Iraq says the United States
cannot afford to allow Saddam Hussein to gain nuclear weapons, and
that the only sure way to prevent that from happening is to invade
Iraq and remove him from power.
Kenneth Pollack is the author of "The Threatening Storm: The Case for
Invading Iraq," published September 26 by Random House. He has served
on the National Security Council as director for Persian Gulf affairs
and Near East and South Asian affairs, and as a military analyst at
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) focusing on Iran and Iraq.
In an exclusive interview with the Washington File October 4, Pollack
said that preventing Saddam Hussein from obtaining nuclear arms must
be done "sooner rather than later, although we may not have to deal
with it, necessarily, immediately." The reason for acting is not the
fear that the Iraqi leader would use a nuclear weapon in an unprovoked
attack against the United States, Pollack says, terming such use
unlikely.
"The real danger," he said, is that Hussein "does believe that when he
possesses nuclear weapons, he will be unconstrained in terms of what
he can do to other countries in the region. He will feel enabled to
once again embark on new aggression against Kuwait, or Saudi Arabia,
Jordan, Syria, Turkey -- you name it," Pollack said.
He noted that the Western intelligence agencies -- American, French,
British and German - all believe Hussein is between three and six
years away from being able to produce his own nuclear weapon. Those
estimates "are based on the assumption that Saddam is not able to
acquire highly enriched uranium on the black market. What they're
afraid of is that, if he is able to do so, it would be more like a
matter of months, or at most a year or two, before he could build a
nuclear weapon," Pollack added.
"Once he has a nuclear weapon, then all bets are off, because no one
is going to invade Iraq once Saddam has a nuclear weapon," Pollack
said.
As for other policy options besides invasion, Pollack finds them all
lacking in being able to keep Hussein from getting nuclear weapons.
Deterrence, for example, which the United States used against the
Soviet Union for decades, is not a reasonable choice against Iraq,
because Hussein "is a serial 'miscalculator,'" who "comes up with
fantastic theories about how he is going to extricate himself from
whatever mess he's gotten himself into, and they often make absolutely
no sense to anyone else but Saddam -- not just Westerners but his own
advisers," Pollack said. His advisers are understandably reluctant to
point out weaknesses in his reasoning, according to Pollack, "because
Saddam has a bad habit of shooting the messenger."
A new round of U.N. weapons inspections is not the answer to this
threat either, Pollack argued.
By 1996 "Saddam had gotten so good at hiding his weapons of mass
destruction that the inspectors had no idea where to look. . Today,
four years after the end of the inspection regime, the Iraqis seem
very confident that the inspectors can come in and they won't find
anything," Pollack said. Because of that, new inspectors would end up
being forced to tell the United Nations that, because they can't find
the weapons, the United Nations itself "has to convince Saddam to
surrender them. And the problem is, the U.N., the international
community, has lost the stomach to force Saddam to comply," he said.
As for other scenarios for dealing with the problem, Pollack finds
each of them deficient. "Smart sanctions," which Secretary of State
Colin Powell advocated at the beginning of the Bush administration,
"were a clever idea" but proved unworkable because of the huge amount
of smuggling now taking place with Iraq -- $3,000 million a year,
Pollack said.
"The amount of money that it would have taken to . bribe the neighbors
to comply with the sanctions was exorbitant," he said. "You'd have to
be willing to pay them so much money that it would be worth it to them
to not only take your money but then not to take Saddam's on top of
it."
Pollack warned that after a successful invasion, a successful
post-Hussein Iraq would require the United States to "help Iraq to
build an Arab democracy, and we can't define for them what that looks
like. . We also have to help them to build a free-market economy. . We
also need to put in place a system that protects all of Iraq's ethnic
and religious groups," he said.
"And what this all adds up to is a willingness to commit sizeable
resources, and to do it over the long term. . We have to recognize
that this is not going to be a quick or easy process, and we have to
be ready to help them for the 10, or 15, or possibly even 20 years
that it will take to do this," Pollack said.
Pollack is currently a senior foreign policy fellow at The Brookings
Institution. He served as director for Persian Gulf affairs at the
National Security Council from 1999 to 2001, and as director for Near
East and South Asian affairs there in 1995-1996. He was a senior
research professor at the National Defense University in 1998-99, and
then again in 2001, and worked as a military analyst at the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1988 to 1995, focusing on Iran and
Iraq. He has a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
Following is a transcript of the interview conducted by Washington
File Staff Writer David Denny:
(begin transcript)
QUESTION: Opponents of a pre-emptive strike against Iraq cite a lack
of new and current evidence to suggest a threat that would necessitate
a U.S. attack on Iraq. Is the administration right to consider Iraq a
real and dangerous threat? What reasons or rationale would you advance
to support an invasion of Iraq?
POLLACK: Very important question: The truth of the matter is that
there isn't any particularly new evidence. The problem is that we are
simply further along in time. What I say in the book is that we are
going to have to deal with this threat sooner rather than later,
although we may not have to deal with it, necessarily, immediately. In
fact I lay out a number of conditions that I'd like to see the United
States secure before we actually go ahead and invade Iraq.
But in terms of the timing, the real issue is the progress of Saddam
Hussein's nuclear weapons. It's been four years since the inspections
ended in Iraq, and during that time the information we have is that
Saddam Hussein has continued to pursue nuclear weapons. We know that
he was pursuing nuclear weapons even when the inspectors were in Iraq
during the early 1990s.
The question that's out there is the ticking clock of Saddam Hussein's
nuclear weapons program. What all the Western intelligence agencies
believe -- and that's the U.S., the French, the British, and the
Germans -- all believe that it is only a matter of time before Saddam
Hussein acquires nuclear weapons. They believe that it will probably
be somewhere between three and six years -- although their estimates
vary -- about three-to-six years before he is able to build one
indigenously.
Now, what we've found in the past is that Western intelligence has
consistently underestimated Saddam's progress toward nuclear weapons.
So even when you hear three-to-six years, you want to err on the side
of caution. And beyond that, of course, this is one we can't afford to
get wrong -- because once he has a nuclear weapon, then all bets are
off, and the option of an invasion is off the table, because no one is
going to invade Iraq once Saddam has a nuclear weapon.
So the point is, we've got to get it right. We can't afford to
misjudge this, and even the intelligence agencies believe that it's
simply a matter of a few years. What that suggests is, we may not have
to do it immediately, but we can't wait too long.
And I'll add one thing: The estimates of the intelligence communities
are based on the assumption that Saddam is not able to acquire highly
enriched uranium on the black market. What they're afraid of is that,
if he is able to do so, it would be more like a matter of months, or
at most a year or two, before he could build a nuclear weapon --
something he has been trying to do for 25 years, and has never been
successful at.
Q: You have written that, historically, Saddam has not been deterred
by the threat of retaliatory strikes and thus the potential for his
use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) is not as constrained as one
might expect. Could you elaborate on this point?
A: The problem of Saddam Hussein is not that he is irrational or
suicidal; the problem is that he is a serial "miscalculator." He is
aggressive and risk-taking by nature, and what we have found, watching
him in power for 34 years, is that faced with a difficult situation,
Saddam Hussein will interpret reality in ways that accord with what he
wants to have happen -- often regardless of how bizarre or fantastic
his conclusions are. And in fact, time and again we have found that
other senior Iraqis around Saddam have greatly disagreed with Saddam's
own assessments of the situation and the likelihood of success in some
of his more outrageous adventures. But none of them has been in a
position to tell him that it was a mistake to do so, because Saddam
has a bad habit of shooting the messenger.
Q: There is a lot of back-and-forth about Saddam's support of
terrorists. Do you think he presents a serious threat to the world as
a result of his history or present proclivities?
A: Saddam's Iraq is a state sponsor of terrorism. There is no question
about that. They were a charter member of the State Department's list
of state sponsors of terrorism, and well-deserved. That said, it is
also true that in the 1980s, Saddam changed his relationship with
different terrorist groups. He ratcheted down -- diminished somewhat
-- his support for international terrorist groups, and instead focused
more on regional terrorist groups -- groups that he used against his
own enemies. So he supported the Mujahadin e Khalq against Iran; he
supported the Kurdish Workers Party, the PKK, against Turkey.
Now what we are finding in 2002 is that Saddam has started ratcheting
up his support for Palestinian terrorist groups against Israel, as a
way of exacerbating the violence between Israelis and Palestinians in
a desperate bid to divert attention from his own misdeeds and prevent
the United States from coming after him.
Q: Are you talking specifically about -- or only about -- this giving
money to the families of suicide --
A: No, more than that. "Sixty Minutes" actually did a wonderful piece
on Sunday [September 29] which was about how the Israelis have
uncovered all kinds of documents -- when they went into Ramallah and
raided Arafat's headquarters -- uncovered all kinds of documents
linking the Iraqis much more directly with certain Palestinian
terrorist groups.
I should also say something about al-Qaeda. In the past, Saddam's
relationship with al-Qaeda was always very tenuous -- not a whole lot
you could pin on him, and I think there really isn't a very good case
that he was somehow responsible for September 11th, or even involved
in September 11th. That said, there are reports now and the
administration is claiming that they have information -- in part from
the Israelis -- that indicate that those ties have deepened. It is
something that's entirely possible. We've always known that because of
the common interest between Iraq and al-Qaeda that there were people
in these two different organizations that were trying to make contact
with each other. But I think the administration is going to have to
come forward with some of that evidence to make the case stronger than
they have so far.
Q: On the face of it, you'd think that bin Laden wouldn't want
anything to do with him, because he's secular. He's not trying to
install an Islamic regime. He attacked the first Islamic regime.
A: Correct. A line from the book: He's killed far more mullahs than he
has American soldiers in his lifetime. And this is why I think that
anyone's first position has to be skepticism that they have now made
common cause, but nevertheless you also shouldn't rule it out.
Q: As a former member of the Clinton Administration's national
security team and involved with U.S.-Iraq policy, you were an early
voice in warning of the danger posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Why
doesn't the case against Saddam have more resonance in the world,
especially in Europe?
A: I think that the European governments have downplayed --
purposefully downplayed the threat of Iraq for years. One of the
things that has always struck us - me, when I was in the government
and outside -- is that at the technical level, their intelligence
personnel, their foreign ministry personnel, share our assessments of
the threat of Saddam Hussein. But their governments have done nothing
to educate their people about this threat. As a result, the U.S. move
toward a military operation against Saddam seems to come from a
vacuum. Whereas the U.S. government over the last 10-12 years I think
has done a much better job of educating the American people about the
threat from Iraq.
Q: If Iraq attains nuclear capability, you outline a frightening
scenario in which Saddam would again invade Kuwait and blunt any
effort to stop him by threatening to use nuclear weapons on the oil
fields of the Middle East. A nuclear attack on Middle East oil
production would cause tremendous, long-lasting economic harm to the
world. How credible is this threat? Is it by itself a sufficient
argument for invading Iraq?
A: When I was at CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], one of my bosses,
the deputy director for intelligence, a very senior official, gave the
edict that we will not predict what Saddam Hussein will not do. It was
a very wise edict, because Saddam Hussein is truly unpredictable.
Again, he comes up with fantastic theories about how he is going to
extricate himself from whatever mess he's gotten himself into, and
they often make absolutely no sense to anyone else but Saddam -- not
just westerners but even his own advisers.
And they lead him to do things that everyone else looks at and thinks
they're foolish: invading Iran, invading Kuwait, deciding to stay in
Kuwait in 1991, even threatening Kuwait again in 1994. At the time,
everyone believed that Saddam would never do something like that,
because everyone assumed that it was foolish and Saddam knew that it
was foolish.
Q: They assumed he's a rational actor, and that he sees the world the
way they do.
A: Correct. But the problem is, he's rational in the sense that he
calculates, and he has a means-ends chain, and it is a rational
calculation. The problem is, the inputs into the calculus are bizarre.
Q:  Garbage in, garbage out.
A:  Couldn't have said it better myself.
Q: Some critics of a U.S. pre-emptive strike against Iraq believe
Saddam will not commit an unprovoked attack against the United States
or Israel: Do you agree? What are the risks of such an attack by
Saddam?
A: I think it is unlikely that Saddam would commit an unprovoked
attack against the United States. That doesn't seem to be something
he's ventured any interest in doing, and he seems to recognize the
ramifications -- the consequences of doing something like that. But
there are two important points. First, again, we should never try to
-- never think that we can be certain in predicting his behavior,
because he has consistently defied all predictions.
The second point is that the real danger is not that Saddam Hussein
would use them necessarily against us. The real danger is that he will
believe -- we have evidence that he does believe that when he
possesses nuclear weapons, he will be unconstrained in terms of what
he can do to other countries in the region. He will feel enabled to
once again embark on new aggression against Kuwait, or Saudi Arabia,
Jordan, Syria, Turkey -- you name it. I can come up plausible
scenarios for why he might decide to attack any of those countries,
and even though none of them may seem likely at this minute, we have
seen him in power for 34 years, and he has consistently taken actions
that stupefied all those trying to assess his likely behavior.
8. In your recent Foreign Affairs essay, you make a compelling
presentation of Saddam's often-irrational behavior and the personality
behind it. What is it about Saddam's personality and consequent
behavior and his particular view of the world that makes him so
dangerous or threatening?
A: The problems with Saddam's behavior are that he is aggressive by
nature; his natural inclination when faced with a problem is to lash
out against it; he is highly risk-tolerant; he has zero regard for
human life; and also believes that it is often necessary to sustain
tremendous damage to achieve an important goal; and believes that he
can always outlast his adversary in terms of a willingness to take
punishment. Finally, again, it is this proclivity to distort reality
-- to interpret reality in line with what he wants to have happen --
his propensity toward wish fulfillment, which makes him truly
dangerous.
Q: Do you give credibility to the argument by some Middle East
observers that a U.S. attack with the goal of regime change in Iraq
will start a domino effect that is certain to cause regional
instability and would ultimately claim several other Middle Eastern
governments?
A: I certainly think that the regional repercussions are a very
important factor for the United States to take into account. I also
believe that right now the Middle East is a very tense place, and
therefore it makes that doubly necessary.
I think that there are a number of other points to be made. First of
all, the leaders of the Arab states seem to be reasonably comfortable
with the United States undertaking a large military operation,
although they would like to see us take steps to reduce the violence
between Israelis and Palestinians before doing so. Second point on
that is that we heard claims that the "Arab street" was going to rise
up many times in the past, and it never has. And that should also make
you somewhat skeptical.
The final point is that while in the short term you probably will get
a lot of anger at the United States, I'm also expecting that the Iraqi
people will welcome a U.S. liberation of Iraq. That will mitigate any
popular unrest in the medium term, but that over the longer term --
which I think in many ways is the most important -- the real outcome
will be determined by what the U.S. does in Iraq after Saddam's fall.
In other words, if the United States leads a multinational effort to
rebuild Iraq as a stable and prosperous Arab democracy, and makes the
commitment and provides the resources necessary to do so, I have every
expectation that both the Iraqi people and the Arab world will come to
look on that extremely positively, and in fact will basically say, "I
want the same thing for myself." I think the real risk is that if the
United States doesn't make that effort -- if we do just topple Saddam
and then cut and run, then we're likely to leave chaos and civil war
in Iraq, and that that will greatly exacerbate the anti-American
sentiments present in the region today.
Q: Have U.N. sanctions-busting by several countries had much effect on
Saddam's ability to achieve his current threat status?
A: Smuggling is one of the biggest problems that we have today with
the demise of containment. Right now, Saddam Hussein is in control of
about $3 billion [thousand million] of his annual revenue, and that is
a huge amount of money for him to buy weapons of mass destruction, pay
off his cronies, and keep his most important military units happy. And
that number is growing. The Turks, the Syrians, the Jordanians are
working as fast as they can to open up additional smuggling routes.
Q: Why not simply enforce the "smart sanctions," as the current
administration wanted to do when it first came into office?
A: The smart sanctions were a clever idea, but they proved unworkable.
And they proved unworkable for a few reasons. Most important of which
is, that they relied on the cooperation of Saddam's neighbors. The
problem is that Iraq's illegal trade with the neighbors is simply too
profitable. The amount of money that it would have taken to --
basically -- bribe the neighbors to comply with the sanctions was
exorbitant. Not only would you have to compensate them for the money
that they were making from Saddam, but you would actually have to pay
them enough to actually make it worthwhile to shut down the smuggling
even after that.
In other words, the Syrians could very easily -- in fact, I think most
people expect -- the Syrians would pocket whatever we gave them and
then keep smuggling. So you'd have to be willing to pay them so much
money that it would be worth it to them to not only take your money
but then to not take Saddam's on top of it. And since the Syrians have
been getting away with it for years, that would have to be a huge
amount of money.
Q:  Why not just send U.N. weapons inspectors back into Iraq?
A: There are two big problems with inspections. Both became manifest
in the later half of the 1990s. The first problem with the inspections
is that by 1996 Saddam had gotten so good at hiding his weapons of
mass destruction that the inspectors had no idea where to look. In
fact, all they were doing was trying to conduct inspections that
would, hopefully, allow them to crack what we called the concealment
mechanism, in hope that that would indirectly allow them to find some
of the weapons of mass destruction.
Today, four years after the end of the inspection regime, the Iraqis
seem very confident that the inspectors can come in and they won't
find anything.
The second big problem out there is that at the end of the day,
because the inspectors can't find anything on their own, what the
inspectors will tell you is that they can't take the weapons away from
Saddam: the U.N. has to convince Saddam to surrender them. And the
problem is, the U.N., the international community, has lost the
stomach to force Saddam to comply.
And so even if we were to get inspectors in there, and even if the
threat of a U.S. invasion did convince a number of countries to
support coercive measures against Saddam in the short term, there's no
expectation that that could last for the years it would take to
actually disarm Iraq.
Q: Why wouldn't the threat of U.S. air strikes against Iraq -- perhaps
an outgrowth of the current regime of enforcing the northern and
southern "no-fly" zones -- be sufficient to deter Saddam from
building, acquiring and using/threatening to use WMD?
A: The problem is that we tried that. In 1998 we mounted Operation
Desert Fox. Four days of air strikes, 650 sorties, 400 cruise missiles
didn't stop him -- didn't deter him. So you have to ask yourself the
question of how big these air strikes would have to be. I think it's
probably true that if we mounted a bigger version of Desert Fox, one
that went on for longer, he probably would give in and agree to
inspections, and then begin to cheat again a few weeks or months
later.
And so the question then becomes: How often do you have to mount these
strikes? Are you doing it monthly? Every other month? Semiannually?
Again, who in the world is going to support these kinds of repeated
strikes? Who in the Arab world is going to let you mount them, given
that they have made very clear that they no longer will support
limited military operations against Iraq. The key there is the word
"limited."
Q: Why not set up a "free Iraq" in northern Iraq, arming the Kurds and
protecting them with air power?
A: I am sentimentally disposed in favor of doing something like that.
The problem is the practical realities, which are, basically -- how do
I put this? The big problem is, you have to fly those air strikes from
a neighboring country. And the neighboring country -- basically, the
only neighboring country we could do it from is Turkey. And Turkey
does not want to see a free Iraq established in northern Iraq, because
they believe that this will simply encourage Kurdish separatism.
Without the Turks on board, we just can't physically do it.
Q: Why not use an approach like that toward Afghanistan, where U.S.
special forces and massive air power destroyed enemy ground forces?
A: The problem is that, the reason the "Afghan approach" worked in
Afghanistan is in large part because the Taliban was a fairly weak
military force, and the Northern Alliance was actually quite close in
terms of military capability. The Taliban, in fact, only had a hard
core of maybe six-or-ten thousand devoted troops, both their own and
al-Qaeda. The rest, the vast majority, 30-to-35,000 were simply tribal
levies and warlord units that had no particular commitment to the
Taliban, and who when we started bombing, faded away into the
landscape and went home, the way that they've always done.
What we found in Iraq in 1991 and ever since then is that the Iraqi
armed forces are vastly more powerful than any of the opposition
groups, and that even by reducing the Iraqi armed forces greatly, they
still have the military capability to easily crush any of the
opposition forces. So, for example, in 1991 we unleashed probably the
most powerful preliminary air campaign in history on the Iraqis. We
followed it up with one of the most decisive ground campaigns in
history -- of the 20th century. At the end of it, the Iraqi armed
forces were disorganized, demoralized and badly disrupted, and yet the
tattered remnants of the Iraqi army -- the Republican Guard that
survived the Gulf War -- were still more than adequate to crush the
two largest simultaneous revolts in Iraqi history, and to do it in
just a couple of weeks.
Q: Won't an Iraq campaign distract and/or detract from the war against
terrorism, especially against al-Qaeda?
A: There is certainly the risk of that. It is certainly something that
the United States needs to be very sensitive to. It's certainly the
case that the United States is an extremely powerful country, and we
can undertake multiple missions simultaneously. However, it is also
true that a major war can be a distraction, and the U.S. government
will have to have thought through all the processes necessary to make
sure that that single-minded focus doesn't happen this time.
A second problem that is out there is the possibility of losing allied
support, which the U.S. will have to guard against. Given the fact
that there is a lot of dissension in the world over an operation
against Iraq, there's the potential for the United States to have
allied governments renege on their commitments to fight the war
against terrorism, because they're unhappy with U.S. operations
against Iraq. I think that's one of the reasons why the United States
needs to build an international coalition, and needs to take on board
the qualms of our adversaries to make sure that when we do move
against Iraq we don't lose allied support against al-Qaeda.
Q: Wouldn't an invasion of Iraq require a similar number of ground
forces (700,000) and allies providing us with basing/staging rights as
we needed in 1990-91?
A: No, probably not. An invasion will have to be massive and
overwhelming, but what we learned in Desert Storm was that we probably
didn't need the size force we had then. We had 700,000 troops, and we
didn't need all 700,000 to defeat the Iraqis then.
Today the Iraqi armed forces are even weaker than they were during the
Gulf War, so there's no real expectation that we would need anything
like a commensurate-sized force to do the job this time. That said, we
are still going to need a very sizeable force, both to make sure that
we win, and that we win quickly and decisively, and with a minimum of
casualties, both American combat troops and Iraqi civilians. And also
because at the end of the day, we need to be in a position where we
can maintain security in the country. If we go in with a very small
force, we are likely to find that at the end of the day, the whole
country erupts in civil war and chaos, because we don't have enough
people to, basically, replace the control of the government.
Q:  Is that what we're running into in Afghanistan right now?
A: Absolutely. I think this is one of the mistakes we've made in
Afghanistan. We didn't put enough force in, and as a result, you know,
Hamid Karzai is nothing but the mayor of Kabul. And in the
countryside, it's run by the warlords, who fight each other, and use
thehumanitarian relief as they see fit. And we can't afford to allow
that to happen in Iraq.
Q: Wouldn't massed forces on Saddam's border be likely targets for his
CBW-tipped Scuds and long-range artillery shells?
A: First off, it's very difficult for Saddam to use Scuds to hit
tactical targets. SCUDS are just too inaccurate to do so.
Long-range artillery is certainly a possibility, but the United States
has outstanding capabilities to deal with Iraqi artillery. During the
Gulf War, our troops suffered -- barely suffered at all from Iraqi
artillery. Their artillery isn't very good, and our ability to
suppress their artillery is excellent.
Obviously, our troops will want to err on the side of caution, but
those kinds of threats are definitely the kind of thing that the
United States can deal with -- especially if we bring a massive,
overwhelming force to bear.
Q: What do you view as essential elements in establishing a
post-Saddam Iraq?
A: We have to be committed to building a stable, prosperous Iraq. When
we finally leave Iraq, everyone in the world needs to look at it and
say, "That is a success story. You have a government that is
responsive to the needs of its people and that seeks to enrich them,
rather than to fleece them" -- which has been the history of Iraqi
governments in the 20th century.
Iraq doesn't necessarily have to be a democracy identical to our own
-- although, I actually suspect that our -- that, literally, the
American model of democracy may well be the best one for Iraq, for its
own reasons. We need to help Iraq to build an Arab democracy, and we
can't define for them what that looks like. They have to define it for
themselves, but we certainly need to be there, along with the U.N.,
and hopefully, with an international coalition, to help them to build
that Iraqi Arab democracy.
We also have to help them to build a free market economy. And again,
we can't necessarily define it for them, but we have to be there,
ready to help, both in terms of advice and resources.
We also need to put in place a system that protects all of Iraq's
ethnic and religious groups. We can't call them minorities, because
one of the most oppressed groups is the Sh'ia, who are the majority.
And all of Iraq's ethnic and religious groups need to enjoy protection
under the law. There has to be rule of law, and the legal system has
to guarantee the rights of individuals and groups -- which is actually
one of the reasons why I suspect that our system may be the best one
for them, because it does provide for such checks on the power of the
state.
And what all of this adds up to is a willingness to commit sizeable
resources, and to do it over the long term. And it won't break the
bank. It won't necessarily amount to another Marshall plan for Iraq,
because Iraq does have tremendous resources, both in terms of its oil
wealth and a secular, well-educated population -- by Middle Eastern
standards.
But we have to recognize that this is not going to be a quick or easy
process, and we have to be ready to help them for the 10, or 15, or
possibly even 20 years that it will take to do this. And my
expectation is that the costs and the requirements on us will diminish
over time, but nonetheless, we've got to see this as a long-term
process.
(end transcript)
(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S.
Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)